Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Self-enhancement, the motive to view oneself in positive light: Not only are heritable its manifestations at the subjective & intermediate level, but also are the objective level & its relation with psychological well-being

›
On the Etiology of Self-Enhancement and Its Association With Psychological Well-Being. Yu L. L. Luo, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai. Soc...

The existence of female orgasm is intriguing: On the one hand, female orgasm is not necessary for female reproductive success, & on the other hand, this neuro-endocrine reflex is too complex to be an evolutionary accident

›
An experimental test of the ovulatory homolog model of female orgasm. Mihaela Pavlicev, Andreja Moset Zupan, Amanda Barry, Savannah Walters,...

From 2016... Not only bilateral trade but global trade openness also significantly promotes peace

›
From 2016... Does Trade Integration Contribute to Peace? Jong‐Wha Lee, Ju Hyun Pyun. Review of Development Economics, January 28 2016. https...

Patients with Lesions to Left Prefrontal Cortex Have Less Entrenched Beliefs and Are More Skeptical Reasoners

›
Patients with Lesions to Left Prefrontal Cortex (BA 9 and BA 10) Have Less Entrenched Beliefs and Are More Skeptical Reasoners. Vinod Goel, ...

The anterior cingulate cortex is an important cognitive control area for both sexually arousing and disgust stimuli; the activation of the thalamus may indicate a general automatic response towards sexual disgust

›
Long, Xipeng and Tian, Fangfang and Zhou, Yushan and Cheng, Bochao and Yi, Siqi and Jia, Zhiyun, The Neural Correlates of Sexual Arousal and...

Liberals express compassion toward less structured & more encompassing entities (friends, world), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined & less encompassing entities (family, nation)

›
Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle. Adam Waytz, Ravi Iyer, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt & Jesse Graham. Nature Co...

We often judge that old objects or objects used by admired celebrities are worth less when cleaned, possible because cleaning removes valued historical traces, and by changing objects from their historic state

›
The glow of grime: Why cleaning an old object can wash away its value. Merrick Levene   Daisy Z. Hu   Ori Friedman. Judgment and Decision Ma...
Monday, September 30, 2019

False information can have short-term effects on what we believe & how we behave politically following exposure, which may be minimal, despite the countervailing narrative in the popular press

›
What’s Next? Six Observations for the Future of Political Misinformation Research. Brian E. Weeks, Homero Gil de Zúñiga. American Behavioral...

Intelligence of males and females were underpinned by different neurobiological correlates, which are consistent with their respective superiority in cognitive domains (visuospatial vs verbal ability)

›
Gender Differences in Connectome-based Predictions of Individualized Intelligence Quotient and Sub-domain Scores. Rongtao Jiang et al. Cereb...

Randomness and related concepts (events happening “accidentally”, “coincidentally” or “by chance”) are typically assumed to occur in a context of small rather than large events

›
Are random events expected to be small? Karl Halvor TeigenAlf Børre Kanten. Psychological Research, September 30 2019. https://link.springer...

90 countries, 45 years of analysis: Financial repression (restrictions on interest rates, credit allocation, capital movements, etc.) poses a significant drag on growth, 0.4-0.7 percentage points

›
Financial Repression is Knocking at the Door, Again. Etibar Jafarov,Rodolfo Maino,Marco Pani. IMF Working Paper No. 19/211. https://www.imf....

Children of divorced parents are less honest than children of non-divorced parents; psychological counseling improves their honesty, and fails to improve children of non-divorced parents

›
Parents’ marital status, psychological counseling and dishonest kindergarten children: An experimental study. Yossef Tobol, Gideon Yaniv. Jo...

Growth has been good after reform in Africa and Latin America, in contrast to the “lost decades” of the 80s and 90s

›
In Search of Reforms for Growth: New Stylized Facts on Policy and Growth Outcomes. William Easterly. NBER Working Paper No. 26318, September...

Gluten aversion is not limited to the political left; perhaps most surprising, supporters of Donald Trump are more likely to identify as avoiding gluten, relative to non-supporters

›
Gluten aversion is not limited to the political left. Trey Malone, F. Bailey Norwood. Agriculture and Human Values, June 20 2019. https://li...

From 2018... Overestimating democracy, despite its absence, is widespread in less developed countries with little or no democratic tradition; underestimating is common in mature, economically developed, Protestant democracies

›
From 2018... Democracy Confused: When People Mistake the Absence of Democracy for Its Presence. Stefan Kruse, Maria Ravlik, Christian Welzel...

Cross-Cultural Variations in Extreme Rejecting and Extreme Affirming Response Styles

›
Cross-Cultural Variations in Extreme Rejecting and Extreme Affirming Response Styles. Tieyuan Guo, Roy Spina. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psyc...

From 1972... Erving Goffman's Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order

›
Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. Erving Goffman. Penguin, 1972. ISBN-13 978-0140216141 Editor text: Until recently...
Sunday, September 29, 2019

3G Internet reduces government approval and increases the perception of corruption in government when the internet is not censored; effect is stronger when traditional media is censored

›
Guriev, Sergei and Melnikov, Nikita and Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, 3G Internet and Confidence in Government (June 30, 2019). SSRN: https://pape...

Binge drinking as a costly sexual signal (the drinker is capable of bearing the harmful consequences of alcohol consumption): Having more eligible men in a district compared to women was associated with higher male drinking rates

›
Operational Sex Ratio Predicts Binge Drinking Across U.S. Counties. Toe Aung et al. Evolutionary Psychology, September 29, 2019. https://doi...

Rebellious music genres (rap, punk & heavy metal) are not linked to maladaptive personality traits; conservative music (country, gospel) was weakly linked to neurotic, hostile, & eccentric tendencies

›
Maladaptive personality and psychopathy dimensions as predictors of music and movie preferences in US adults. Pavel S Blagov et al. Psycholo...

Alcohol by night: People were motivated to preload to save money & socialise, were likely to drink more than they predicted, & were more surprised by their alcohol reading the more they drank

›
Drinking to go out or going out to drink? A longitudinal study of alcohol in night-time entertainment districts. Grant J. Devilly et al. Dru...

The roots of intolerance and opposition to compromise: The effects of absolutism on political attitudes

›
The roots of intolerance and opposition to compromise: The effects of absolutism on political attitudes. Kevin Arceneaux. Personality and In...

James Hankins' Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy

›
Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. James Hankins. Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, Dec 20...

Women & men want a partner that is funnier than themselves; only women want a partner that is also more trustworthy than they are; none want a partner more intelligent

›
From 2018... The Persistence of Established Dating Theories in a Real-Life Dyadic Blind Date Study. Yannick Nout, MSci Thesis, Applied Cogni...

Alan Blinder's influential estimate, 2007: 25pct more of U.S. jobs were at risk of being offshored; instead, more jobs were added than lost, against the scaremongering that millions would be lost

›
Report: Overboard on Offshore Fears. Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Upwork. Sep 27 2019. https://www.upwork.com/press/economics/report-over...

Logic, Fast and Slow: The Persistent Difficulty of the Monty Hall Problem

›
Logic, Fast and Slow: The Persistent Difficulty of the Monty Hall Problem. Jay Kosegarten & Gary Kose. EvoS Journal, 2019, NEEPS XII, pp...
Saturday, September 28, 2019

Italy: 75% of immigrants integrate into the majoritarian culture over a generation; interestingly, a lower cultural intolerance of Italians towards minorities would lead to slower cultural integration

›
Marriage, Fertility, and Cultural Integration in Italy. Alberto Bisin, Giulia Tura. NBER Working Paper No. 26303, September 2019. https://ww...

Women & men perception of breasts: The bigger, the higher the reproductive efficiency, lactational efficiency, sexual desire, promiscuity attributed; & perceived as less faithful & less intelligent

›
Stereotypical and Actual Associations of Breast Size with Mating-Relevant Traits. Krzysztof Kościński, Rafał Makarewicz, Zbigniew Bartoszewi...

A mindset of optimism is associated with lower cardiovascular risk and that promotion of optimism and reduction in pessimism may be important for preventive health

›
Association of Optimism With Cardiovascular Events and All-Cause Mortality - A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Alan Rozanski et al. JAM...

Vegetarian diets may be perceived as inadequately nutritious, inadequately tasty, socially stigmatizing, too expensive, unfamiliar, inconvenient; dominant factors are the two first

›
Taste and health concerns trump anticipated stigma as barriers to vegetarianism. Daniel L.Rosenfeld, A. JanetTomiyama. Appetite, Volume 144,...

Bullshitting frequency was positively associated with overclaiming and negatively associated with sincere self-presentation, honesty, cognitive ability, open-minded cognition, & self-regard

›
Littrell, Shane, Evan Risko, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang. 2019. “The Bullshitting Frequency Scale: Development and Psychometric Properties.” P...

Claims for mirror self-recognition have been made for numerous species ranging from dolphins and elephants to fish and ants; reproducible experimental evidence is avaialable only for some great apes

›
Gallup, G. G., Jr., & Anderson, J. R. (2019). Self-recognition in animals: Where do we stand 50 years later? Lessons from cleaner wrasse...
Friday, September 27, 2019

From 2015... Male homosexual preference: Available data challenges the common view of MHP being a “virtually universal” trait; social stratification together with hypergyny seem necessary for its evolution

›
From 2015... Barthes J, Crochet P-A, Raymond M (2015) Male Homosexual Preference: Where, When, Why? PLoS ONE 10(8), Aug 12 2016, e0134817. ...

From 2016... Homophobia might reflect concerns about sexuality in general and not homosexuality in particular

›
From 2016... Homophobia Is Related to a Low Interest in Sexuality in General: An Analysis of Pupillometric Evoked Responses. Boris Cheval e...

Moderate to strong evidence for the absence of an experimental effect: Belief in a controlling God did not increase after a threat compared to an affirmation of personal control (US & the Netherlands)

›
Hoogeveen, Suzanne, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Aaron Kay, and Michiel van Elk. 2019. “Compensatory Control and Belief in God: A Registered Replic...

Religiosity Predicts Evidentiary Standards: Religious individuals exhibited a bias for believing religious claims relative to scientific claims, while nonreligious guys were consistent in their standards of evidence across domains

›
Religiosity Predicts Evidentiary Standards. Emilio J. C. Lobato et al. Social Psychological and Personality Science, September 9, 2019. http...

Facebook is found as a useful tool to fulfil human needs, which predict continued Facebook use intentions of participants, and further, satisfaction with life

›
Who Needs Social Networking? An Empirical Enquiry into the Capability of Facebook to Meet Human Needs and Satisfaction with Life. David Houg...

The Social Effects of Internet Deprivation: Can You Engage in Political Activity Without Internet Access? Very little, it seems

›
Can You Engage in Political Activity Without Internet Access? The Social Effects of Internet Deprivation. Ryan Shandler, Michael L Gross, Da...

When a woman is more attractive than her mate, men desire to mate poach, and if a woman is less attractive than her partner, men desire to mate copy

›
Moran, J. B., & Wade, T. J. (2019). Perceptions of a mismatched couple: The role of attractiveness on mate poaching and copying. Evoluti...

The relationship between tickling, sensation, and laughter is complex; tickling or its mere anticipation makes us laugh, but not when we self-tickle; the study uses rats to understand self-tickle suppression & tickle anticipation

›
Behavioral and Cortical Correlates of Self-Suppression, Anticipation, and Ambivalence in Rat Tickling. Shimpei Ishiyama, Lena V. Kaufmann, M...

Those who are off Facebook for one week reduce news consumption, are less likely to recognize politically-skewed news stories, report being less depressed and engage in healthier activities; these results are strongest for men

›
The economic effects of Facebook. Roberto Mosquera et al. Experimental Economics, September 26 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.10...
Thursday, September 26, 2019

The link between people’s social relationships and their level of self-esteem is truly reciprocal in all developmental stages across the life span, reflecting a positive feedback loop between the constructs

›
Harris, M. A., & Orth, U. (2019, September 26). The Link Between Self-Esteem and Social Relationships: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal S...

Non-Religious Identities and Life Satisfaction: Questioning the Universality of a Linear Link between Religiosity and Well-Being

›
Non-Religious Identities and Life Satisfaction: Questioning the Universality of a Linear Link between Religiosity and Well-Being. Katharina ...